Mozilla Develops Firefox Version That Favors Bing

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Mozilla said Wednesday that it has designed a customized version of Firefox available with Microsoft's Bing as the default search engine.

Mozilaa's decision shouldn't come as any surprise; last year, Microsoft announced that Bing, as well as Yahoo, would be included as supported search engines in Firefox 4. The various search engines can be set via options within the browser itself.

"Mozilla and Bing are pleased to make available Firefox with Bing, a customized version of Firefox that sets Bing as the default search engine in the search box and AwesomeBar and makes Bing.com the default home page," Mozilla said in a statement on Wednesday. "Existing Firefox users can also make these changes by installing the Bing Search for Firefox Add-on," it added.

Mozilla also releases customized versions of its Firefox browser for different partners and geographies. There are nearly 20 customized versions of Firefox distributed globally by partners including Bing, United Internet, Twitter, Yahoo and Yandex, Mozilla said.

Mozilla released Firefox 6, after a much-publicized decision to back off the numbers indicating version changes. But the company also recently had a change of heart, with pleans to retain the numbers.

The next iteration of Mozilla's Firefox for Android will also include a native UI rather than the company's XUL implementation, Mozilla recently said, a change that is intended to produce much faster startup times.

Mark Hachman Mark joined ExtremeTech in 2001 as the news editor, after rival CMP/United Media decided at the time that online news did not make sense in the new millennium.
Mark stumbled into his career after discovering that writing the great American novel did not pay a monthly salary, and that his other possible career choice, physics, required a degree of mathematical prowess that he sorely lacked.
Mark talked his way into a freelance assignment at CMP’s Electronic Buyers’ News, in 1995, where he wrote the...
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